[Forum Upgrade] 01-2021 Feedback Thread

[PDX Forum Dev]

Hello Everyone,

Today we've upgraded to the latest version of our forum software, bringing more features and better performance to the community. As always, we appreciate your bug reports and feedback, and you can post all of that here. Here is a list of new features you can expect to see on the site:

• Upvoting for bug report forums and suggestions forums
• Support for attachments for profile posts and comments
• New "Similar Threads" feature
• New integration with Giphy
• Improvements to the text editor
• New BBCode options for the editor
• Improvements to alerts (now supports, read, unread, and seen)
• Overall performance boost

Known issues:

• Search and "Similar threads" are not returning newer content. This will resolve itself over the next few hours and is just due to changes in the new update that requires the search index to be rebuilt

 

[Phibs]

Can one toggle the similar threads function off somehow?

 

[Mr. Capiatlist]

• New integration with Giphy

Can you elaborate on this?

 

[Wagonlitz]

New "Similar Threads" feature

Noticed this immediately and I don't like it.
It's ugly, useless, and it takes up lots of screen real estate.

The reason it's useless is that it's suggestion threads from all kinds of subfora.
Atm I get from HOI 1, and EU2. And then one from storage. Not really what I'd consider relevant threads.
And even if it was more rlevant then there's still not really any reason for it, since if I wanted other threads I'd do a search.



Is there no fix for the icon issues?

Also, please call icons icons again. That's always been the Paradox way. Badges just feel really bad and wrong to us old veterans.

Would it be possible to have the icon number be a golden bar again? That looked way better, imho.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Hello Everyone,

Today we've upgraded to the latest version of our forum software, bringing more features and better performance to the community. As always, we appreciate your bug reports and feedback, and you can post all of that here. Here is a list of new features you can expect to see on the site:

• Upvoting for bug report forums and suggestions forums
• Support for attachments for profile posts and comments
• New "Similar Threads" feature
• New integration with Giphy
• Improvements to the text editor
• New BBCode options for the editor
• Improvements to alerts (now supports, read, unread, and seen)
• Overall performance boost

Known issues:

• Search and "Similar threads" are not returning newer content. This will resolve itself over the next few hours and is just due to changes in the new update that requires the search index to be rebuilt

Example of how PDX has always called it icons in the past. This is from when Charlemagne arrived. It was the first DLC to get an icon. Older major DLCs got icons retroactively then.

 

[loup99]

Thank you for this summary.

Anyone who managed to disable the "Similar threads" option? It is too big and distracts you when trying to reply, you don't want to see other completely unrelated threads and I can't help myself from reading it, so for me personally that design doesn't work at all. Not sure what purpose it is meant to serve originally, but others might find it useful for reasons I can't think of as of writing this post. I can't find its name in the code, still not good enough at CSS. When inspecting I disable it temporarily but without the name of the element I can't use a style to disable it. Ideally it would be possible to toggle it off in the forum options.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Thank you for this summary.

Anyone who managed to disable the "Similar threads" option? I can't find its name in the code, still not good enough at CSS. When inspecting I disable it temporarily but without the name of the element I can't use a style to disable it. Ideally it would be possible to toggle it off in the forum options.

Try installing the selector gadget. It allows you to see the CSS elements interactively for anything on a page. That might well be useful for killing ugly and unnecessary things like the similar threads "feature".

 

[loup99]

Try installing the selector gadget. It allows you to see the CSS elements interactively for anything on a page. That might well be useful for killing ugly and unnecessary things like the similar threads "feature".

Isn't that the same thing as the "Inspect" feature on Chrome? Anyway, I have identified the CSS element, but I can't find its specific name. "block.container" or "block" is the generic name for any block.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Isn't that the same thing as the "Inspect" feature on Chrome?

No. It's a plugin for Chrome. it doesn't show you the code, but just tells you which CSS elements would select specific things on a page.

Wheras the inspector shows you the entire site code.

 

[loup99]

No. It's a plugin for Chrome. it doesn't show you the code, but just tells you which CSS elements would select specific things on a page.

Wheras the inspector shows you the entire site code.

Thank you for the tip, although I still can not get a more specific name than "block.container", which is a generic name used in several places, grouping several blocks. Writing:

.block-container {
    display: none !important;
}

disables all such blocks, as expected. I also tried:

.block-container.block-container--xfes_similar_threads {
    display: none !important;
}

and:

.block-container.block-container--xfes_thread_view_below_quick_reply_similar_threads{
    display: none !important;
}

 

[Wagonlitz]

Thank you for the tip, although I still can not get a more specific name than "block.container", which is a generic name used in several places, grouping several blocks. Writing:

.block-container {
    display: none !important;
}

disables all such blocks, as expected.

Unlick the other selected boxes. I..e anything which is yellow which you dont' want to block. Then you'll get a more and more specific path to the similar threads box. once that's the only green/yellow thing then you have a path whihc will allow you to block it, but nothing else.

 

[loup99]

Unlick the other selected boxes. I..e anything which is yellow which you dont' want to block. Then you'll get a more and more specific path to the similar threads box. once that's the only green/yellow thing then you have a path whihc will allow you to block it, but nothing else.

I'm going to experiment a bit more to see if I find it with the shift option to select things, but so far I'm stuck here:

Feels like I'm close to finding the name, but not quite there yet. Might be something obvious I'm doing wrong.

 

[Spartakus]

The Menu bar on top is now larger then the rest of the screen on my mobile phone. Please fix.

Other then that I second the complains about the similar thread feature taking up space. Pretty happy with the performance improvements.

 

[Wagonlitz]

I'm going to experiment a bit more to see if I find it with the shift option to select things, but so far I'm stuck here:

View attachment 675064

If you just take the block container, i.e. the entire thing, is there then anything else being highlighted than that block? If not then it might just be block container which needs to be blocked.


Though I'm no CSS expert myself so can't say for certain.
Perhaps @XYN might know.

 

[loup99]

If you just take the block container, i.e. the entire thing, is there then anything else being highlighted than that block? If not then it might just be block container which needs to be blocked.

No, it selects all the other blocks of that nature too, although you can't see it unless you zoom out maximally and I can't narrow it down when zooming out that much. As I said disabling block container removes all posts from a page, I think every single post is considered as a "block" just as the "Similar threads" "block" is, so when you tell it to not display all content of the blocks you make all the posts invisible too. This might sound a bit silly to someone who actually knows CSS, sorry if I'm butchering it.

 

[Keizer Harm]

I'm also not a big fan of the "Similar threads" feature; I can't really imagine what it is meant to be used for. I get that it showing threads from 2003 is a bug that will be fixed as the search indices are built, but replying to threads older than a few months is strongly discouraged anyway so you're going to have to do a lot of filtering in that box if you don't want everyone to necropost everything - at which point you've lost the vast majority of eligible threads.

I can only imagine its use as an archive function, but why display that by default? Put it behind a button instead.

 

[Wagonlitz]

No, it selects all the other blocks of that nature too, although you can't see it unless you zoom out maximally and I can't narrow it down when zooming out that much. As I said disabling block container removes all posts from a page, I think every single post is considered as a "block" just as the "Similar threads" "block" is, so when you tell it to not display all content of the blocks you make all the posts invisible too. This might sound a bit silly to someone who actually knows CSS, sorry if I'm butchering it.

Yuo can't unselect those other boxes in the tool? Weird. No idea then.

but replying to threads older than a few months is strongly discouraged anyway so you're going to have to do a lot of filtering in that box if you don't want everyone to necropost everything - at which point you've lost the vast majority of eligible threads.

Not to mention that the timeframe after which you shouldnt' reply anymore really really depends on which subforum you're in. In say AARLand and the History forum it might well be ok to revive a 12 months old thread. Whereas in say the CKIII forum reviving a 2 weeks old thread won't be kosher if there was a major patch in between.

it's super situational when you shuld revive a thread and when you can't do it.

Down in OT a thread from 2002, or was it 2001, was revived one or two years ago. So a 16 or 17 years old thread. And that was a legit reviving as the issue oriignally talked about had become relevant again in a way where reviving the old thread was needed. (It was something about dinosaurs, IIRC.)

 

[XYN]

If you just take the block container, i.e. the entire thing, is there then anything else being highlighted than that block? If not then it might just be block container which needs to be blocked.


Though I'm no CSS expert myself so can't say for certain.
Perhaps @XYN might know.

div[data-widget-definition="xfes_similar_threads"]

 

[Keizer Harm]

Also, thanks for decreasing the forum header font size so they all display And upvoting suggestion threads is welcome too!

 

[Wagonlitz]

div[data-widget-definition="xfes_similar_threads"]

Thanks